The Great Healing – part 29: Learning to be Open-Minded – Part 2

In 2010, I spent several weeks travelling around the British Isles looking at various kinds of Sustainable Communities to understand how they functioned.  What I came away with was a lot of ideas for my Sustainable Living text (2012).  There were a lot of ideas that never made it into the book (publisher length constraints), but I have included many in this blog over the past 8 years (more about communities in next post).  I do talk about community a lot, and one aspect I have avoided when I talk about coming together as a community is the difficult one of what do you do when you have people who are just plain a-holes or worse bigots, racists, and all other manner and levels of people haters.  Some people are just plain hard to be around.  The three links, 1, 2 and 3 give good advice on getting past these negative emotions.  If we are going to learn to live together and outfox the hierarchies, we need everyone to be on-board. 

Sadly, for most of us, our upbringings foist on us beliefs that perpetuate lots of judgments about others and a fear of strangers – a long hangover of the worst aspects of tribalism coupled with conditioning to keep us experiencing victimhood as a psychological pain-avoidance coping mechanism.  The only positive thing that our modern lifestyle gives us is that difficult people can commodify everything to minimize contact with the rest of us.  We all have those curmudgeons, or worse, in our lives, but we can for the most part ignore them, or minimize our contact with them.  I know most people do not want to know about the changes coming, but burying one’s head in the sand doesn’t help us adapt to them.  Somedays I do feel like the Trojan Priestess Cassandra in Greek Mythology. 

One of my friends said I sound a tad conspiratorial in my teachings.  All the signs are out there in plain sight for anyone to see, if one is just willing to look, and ignore all the distractions meant to make us not look.  Just looking at the unbelievable transfer of monetary wealth that spirals up to the 0.001% is evidence enough.   I’ve shown this short video on wealth distribution before (done in 2012) about the USA, but it is true for nearly every country in the world.  After the 2008-9 economic meltdown, monetary wealth transfer to the 0.001% increased rapidly.  Then in the 2020 lockdown, it started going into the exponential high growth phase (the hockey stick handle phase), and in just the last 5 years the numbers of billionaires has globally increased to 2791.  That wealth was siphoned off us, the regular people, and it is not trickling back down to us.  It is just getting reinvested in the stock-market to further increase wealth among the financial elites for further control by them.  They could spend their wealth improving society, but that would mean they had a conscience and some kind of compassion of some kind.    

If the top 14 global billionaires (e.g., top 4 – Bernard Arnault, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates) lost 99% of their money, they would still be billionaires.  How would your bank account look if you lost 99%?  It’s too easy to get jealous or hate such people who seem so indifferent to the harm they inflict on the planet, even unknowingly, or inadvertently, as they pursue their greed laden profit-based agendas.   I’m being kind in inferring they are unaware of the sociopathic things they cause. Big numbers sound vague so some perspective: One million seconds is 11.6 Days; One Billion seconds is 31.7 years.       

Most people are living a narrative of victimhood pushed on them by the trickster hierarchy.  We Need to think about ‘regeneration’ of society globally (“The act of improving a place or system, especially by making it more active or successful.”)  But instead of hating these hierarchies, we need to show our better-angels to each other, and then work to ignore these hierarchies and create a different kind of world in which they are irrelevant.  “It’s normal to feel hatred towards people or things that have the potential of causing you real harm or that have harmed you. But if your feelings of hatred are driven by jealousy or insecurity, you may not be able to overcome your hatred unless you deal with those issues first… and, the antidote to hate is compassion — for others as well as ourselves. Self-compassion means that we accept the whole self… If we find part of ourselves unacceptable, we tend to attack others in order to defend against the threat,” says psychologist, Brad Reedy.

Being open-minded means to be LESS JUDGMENTAL, thus being able to show Compassion, Connection and Care.  Let go of the guilty pleasure of judgment, e.g., Gossip rumormongering, scandal, hearsay, blather, etc.  Stop being habituated to behaving as self against other.  Stop judging one’s self against any other.  Move from competition and ego-threat to collaboration and recognition of others as agents of change in which we help each other weather the coming ‘Winds of Change.’  We need to learn to embrace diversity – Let’s celebrate the power of open hearts and minds.

So many positive changes are happening all over the planet at this time that mainstream media are not reporting.  Things that made me a tad iconoclastic 30 years ago are now accepted by a large majority of people as not only possibilities, but probabilities.   I see what we share more than what separates us.  People everywhere are coming to the realization that ‘There has to be a better way of living on this planet that isn’t so destructive to life.’   

It’s about Values.  If greed and maximization of personal gain is supported guess what gets valued – certainly not you as an individual, or a community.  Purging the old patterns are part of our global healing.  The power of intention is everything.  You want a better world, intend it and start to live it in whatever ways you can at the moment.  What happens externally affects you only if you let it do so – don’t give it power over you.  Once you internalize your world, you control what affects you and how you can respond instead of reacting.  Be the beacon for people around you.  If you are affected by negativity around you, then just think how you can be affected by positivity around you – and if you are the positive one, then a kind of ripple effect happens where you can have a profound effect on everyone around you. 

These changes coming may be radical departures from what we knew, but that doesn’t mean they have to be traumatic.  Victims feel that things happen to them, while doers respond to what is happening.  Find unconditional Love for yourself and then others.  It’s hard to hate when you can see the light, however hidden it may seem, in others.  I seem to be rambling today, so I’ll close with this poster of saying by blogger Colby Kultgen.   I particularly like #2 – life doesn’t seem that long when it is framed differently.  Most of them are common sense and positive platitudes, but since we live in a world of anger and recriminations, some positivity seems appropriate.    

20 sentences I wish I’d read sooner in life by Colby Kultgen

1. Action is the antidote to anxiety.
2. You get 4000 weeks if you’re lucky – stop waiting.
3. Notice the people who bring out your favorite version of yourself.
4. You teach people how to treat you by what you tolerate.
5. Growth happens when you do things you feel unqualified to do.
6. The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.
7. If you don’t schedule your priorities, someone else will.
8. The most dangerous addiction is the approval of other people.
9. Burnout happens when you treat rest as a reward rather than a right.
10. You’ll never regret investing in your health, learning, or relationships.
11. Normalize not having an opinion on things you aren’t informed on.
12. The only person who’s going to magically show up to save you – is you.
13. Your habits are the silent architects of your life.
14. Discipline is choosing what you want most over what you want now.
15. The people who matter won’t leave you for having boundaries.
16. Your worth isn’t tied to your productivity.
17. Reach out to people just because they crossed your mind.
18. Not everything requires your reaction – silence is a response too.
19. Action creates motivation – not the other way around.
20. You can literally change your life any day – you can wake up tomorrow and decide that you want something different.